


Lull

by cynthia_arrow (thesilverarrow)



Series: Some Lost ficlets [5]
Category: Lost
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:43:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5740663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverarrow/pseuds/cynthia_arrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He's not sorry.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lull

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally posted to livejournal, 2008. For the prompt: write about a character you hate.)

He's not sorry.  
  
Each rock of the boat jolts him for a while, when he first climbs in, but as the island recedes, he recedes. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. _It can't have happened because I am not that man._  
  
Each rock of the boat shifts his shoulder into Walt's. _How can this be?_ Just weeks, still counted in days, that he's been his father, really been his father, that it comes to this?  
  
(A voice in the back of his head, or maybe with that man's smooth cold tone, tells him it was always in him, that it has nothing to do with Walt.)  
  
He wants to cling tighter to his son, but he doesn't. He can't. He can't cling to anything. He has to let it all slip away.  
  
_Thank God he will never know._  
  
The air is clammy on his skin. Each rock of the boat lulls him now, firm in its insistence that it's all been a bad dream. He's not sorry. It wasn't reality. It wasn't _civilization_. Normal rules don't apply. It turns out the wild is a lot less real than the world. They all made hard choices, and they were done like people make moves on a chess board, without feeling for the pieces. Sacrifice the pawn. Win. They all want to win, don't they?  
  
He looks down at the top of Walt's head. _Yes. Had to._  
  
The lull of the water is powerful. It's like the way sleep pulls you back under after a nightmare. He can still feel the adrenaline in that moment after the gun went off, how it all dissolved away in a throb into the days that passed like a fever. Half in and half out. Quiet, he kept thinking, but his blood cried out against him. He didn't know what it wanted to tell, but it needed to tell something he couldn't let them hear.  
  
(He had thought he might want to die, but once the nausea passed, he couldn't feel that anymore either.)  
  
The rock of the boat pulls him under like sleep after a long nightmare, but it also pulls him under like the water could, to press him in on himself as the water might press against his eardrum. Everything's muffled, even Walt's hand knocking against his at the rail. Drowned. Might've drowned on the raft. Could drown now, if he just pitched forward. _Sink like a stone._  
  
Can't.  
  
He's sorry. Somewhere deep down when he looks at Walt, he feels it. Walt's here and he can't just let everything drown him, and it doesn't matter if he let him slip through his fingers before, watching him go halfway around the world because he was too weak to keep a tight grip on him.  
  
Oh, but he can't even grip tightly now. He's afraid of him.  
  
An even smaller voice in the back of his brain: _Is he worth it?_  
  
He nods his head forcefully. So: _What will our lives be?_ When, now. Not if. After everything, there's no way he's not going to get home.  
  
He takes it a deep breath. It will all pass. He never thought he'd see the island disappear over the horizon, but it did. A mercy. Surely in his life he deserves a little mercy. And Walt, too.  
  
He's not sorry, he tells himself, because there's nothing, really, to be sorry for. They're all dead anyway, to this world he's clawing his way back into. They'd claw if they had to, sacrifice anything.  
  
_It might've been their mercy, too_.  
  
The boat jolts with a hard crest and his hand slips along the railing. There's only this—his hands and Walt's head and the boat cutting forward and forward. There's nothing at all behind them.


End file.
